What Do You See When You Look at This Cover?

One of the perks of leaving the world of cable news for the world of fashion magazines, is that I get to see the new ELLE covers before they hit newsstands. Yes, go ahead and hate because I was in possession of the Beyoncé cover a full 48 hours before anyone outside the building had it. Baby, I was strutting around NYC like I knew winning lotto numbers.

Last week, we got our first look at the August magazine. Gracing our cover is an extraordinary and versatile artist who defies easy categorization—the British vocalist, songwriter, dancer, producer FKA twigs. FKA twigs is a woman of color, whose father is Jamaican and mother is Spanish and English. On our cover she is simultaneously intense, stylish, fierce, and vulnerable, lovely, open. It's a very ELLE image.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Here is my question. What do you see when you look at our August cover? It is below. Take a moment. Take a look. What do you see?

Paola Kudacki for ELLE

Most Popular

What did you see? Here in the ELLE family some saw a fantastic cover ready to hit the newsstands. Others saw a mistake. The kind of mistake legacy fashion magazines make far too often and one that needed to be addressed—immediately. See it? In the upper right. It is teaser for an article entirely unrelated to the cover story interview with FKA twigs. But there it is, right next to her head: Becky Who? It's Going to Be You With the Good Hair?

Face. Palm.

I was not the first person to point out the complications of this cover line. It does not really matter who was. What matters is this: within the ELLE family, some folks looked at this image and saw "hell yes!" and some folks looked at it and saw "what the hell?"

I've spent more than two decades as a professor, writer, and public figure trying (and often failing) to engage in conversations about race and representation. It is not easy, but we learn more from trying to engage than from trying to defend. The question of whether ELLE has committed a racial faux pas or even an egregious act of racism by inserting the "Becky with the good hair" reference right next to the lovely visage of FKA twigs on our August cover is not merely a matter of opinion, taste, or aesthetic; it is a matter of race, power, privilege, and ongoing issues of diversity and representation in the industry. So let's take a moment—a teachable moment—and see what we might learn.

We learn more from trying to engage than from trying to defend.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Lesson 1: Becky 101

Unless you made a vow in the past 90 days to live without audio, visual, or popular cultural stimulation of any kind from the North American continent, then you are undoubtedly aware that "Becky with the good hair" refers to the final lines from the raucous, unapologetic track "Sorry" from Beyoncé's smash hit Lemonade album in which she instructs her philandering husband that "He better call Becky with the good hair." If you are a member of the Beyhive or the millennial generation, you may know there was a short-lived social media manhunt for "the real Becky" based on the presumption that some woman had the audacity to sleep with Beyoncé's husband and had the nerve to have more easily manageable hair! The madness even managed to (misguidedly) target cooking show host Rachel Ray at one point.

Sir Mix-A-Lot introduced us to the delusional Becky in 1992. Nearly 25 years later, there are millions to be made in a beauty industry helping women achieve the backs featured in his video.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

While Queen Bey is currently deploying the Becky trope, she did not create it. As Damon Young, author of one of my favorite culture critique blogs, Very Smart Brothas, observes, "There are several theories on its etymology, but the one that makes the most sense is that it stems from the first lines of Sir Mix-A-Lot 's "Baby Got Back," in which a white woman drones: Oh, my, god. Becky, look at her butt/It is so big./ She looks like one of those rap guys' girlfriends." Becky personifies the cruel rejection of black women's bodies through a small-minded policing of white beauty standards. Becky is also hilariously unaware of her undesirability relative to the black bodies she seeks to degrade. Sir Mix-A-Lot introduced us to the delusional Becky in 1992. Nearly 25 years later, there are millions to be made in a beauty industry helping women achieve the backs featured in his video.

Most Popular

When Beyoncé invokes Becky she is telling us something quite particular: Becky is way of expressing a particular version of white womanhood. "Hillary Clinton? Not a Becky. Natalie Portman? Not really a Becky," writes Damon Young. "Taylor Swift? The Beckiest. Iggy Azelea? Darth Becky." I found empirical evidence of this Becky construct while conducting research for my bookSister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America: African American women define themselves as strong, resilient, and independent while perceiving white women as passive, dishonest, arrogant, and privileged. This does not mean all black women think all white women are Beckys, but it reveals something we didn't previously have social science evidence to support. Researchers spend a lot of time asking about anti-black stereotypes held by white Americans, but rarely ask what black people think about white people, presumably because everyone thinks white folks are just swell!

When Beyoncé released Lemonade, I asked a roundtable of writers and thinkers, "What would happen if we took the hopes, dreams, pain, joy, loss, bodies, voices, stories, expressions, styles, families, histories, futures of black girls and women and put them in the center and started from there?" Understanding Becky—who she is and what she means—is part of the process of centering black women. What if we asked black women what they think about white women instead of just asking white women what they think about sisters? It is what Beyoncé does in this line. "He better call Becky with the good hair" inverts everything that is supposed to be valuable—whiteness and "good hair" suddenly become objects of derisions instead of desire. So it is odd to try to now say we want to good hair. Beyoncé has made it a silly pursuit. Whatever Becky. Bye Felicia. Call Tyrone.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

When our cover asks, "Becky who?" some editors saw a reference to a now-famous subversiveBeyoncé lyric. It is that. Other editors see a reference to painful, and at times divisive, racial history, where white women stole the culture, the lives, and the loves of black women, and black women fought back by discursively diminishing them as "Beckys" in return. It is that too.

Which brings us to our second lesson. Not everyone will see the same thing.

Lesson 2: Not everyone sees the same thing.

An unreleased cover is protected with dear life within the Hearst building, but I needed to know how people outside the industry responded to our August issue dilemma. So I leaked it—just a little—to a small group of cousins, nieces, and sisters gathered on my back porch during my family reunion in North Carolina last weekend.

Courtesy Melissa Harris-Perry

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

It was an utterly, unscientific focus group. But there were black folk spanning four decades from 13- to 55-years-old; men, women, boys, girls, gay, straight, gender-conforming and non-conforming in many hues of black, brown, and tan. They were rocking short naturals, locks, twists, braids, fros, and fades. Some live in big cities, some in the rural South, some in the Midwest, and some in the Northeast, one was even visiting from her adopted home in China. They were all listening to loud music, telling old stories, and most of the grown folks had imbibed at least one (ok two drinks) by this point in the evening. And one more thing, no one in my family has ever experienced any difficulty forming and expressing an opinion on any topic—ever.

Most Popular

Into that fray I presented my precious, highly guarded early copy the August issue. Within the first 30 seconds these exclamations all escaped from my relatives:

"Is that a chastity belt she is wearing?"

"Why do they only put light skin girls on the cover of magazines?"

"Do you have an article in here Auntie?"

"OMG, I love FKA twigs!"

"Who in the world is FKA twigs?"

"What the hell with the good hair thing?"

None responded with the concern that some of my colleagues felt a few days earlier. But most felt at least vaguely unsettled by some combination of the images and words they encountered. It may have taken a moment of reflection, a head cocked slightly to the side, eyes narrowed to a squint, but eventually most of my cousins were irritated by the Becky reference and annoyed by the "good hair" language.

Race and gender shape our lived experiences, but they are not wholly deterministic.

I retell this story to disrupt the idea that all white people and all black people have the same responses to the images we encounter and that we can predict those responses outside of context and experience. At ELLE the variety of responses to the cover were mostly occurring among white women. On my back porch, the varied responses came from black women. Race and gender shape our lived experiences, but they are not wholly deterministic. Even as fashion and publishing industries are pushed to "do better" with respect to race and representation, this effort cannot be simple and reductive.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

My initial reaction to the Becky/ good hair reference on the cover was… meh. But I got mad when I turned to page 110 as referenced in the tease. There I found a full-page image of a white woman with platinum blond hair with the word BEAUTY emblazoned across her bangs and "America's Most Wanted" beneath her chin. Now I was pissed. Eyes red and swirly, smoke coming out of my ears, mad. I thought the "good hair" reference next to FKA twigs could potentially be subversive, suggesting that her dark, stylish locks are an alternate definition of "good hair" displacing all the Beckys of the world. I dislike good/bad dichotomous thinking about hair, but I was willing to read this as a disruption of Eurocentric standards—a kind of interesting inversion. But page 110 was downright triggering!

For my niece, though, the cover was enough. As soon as she read the line she lost her mind. "Oh hell, no."

And that, dear reader, is lesson number 3; black women's hair is serious business. Don't play with it.

Lesson 3: Black women's hair is personal and political

Let me make this plain. For most black women in America (although not all), if we allow our hair to simply grow out of our heads in its natural state, most people will assume that we are making a social and political statement. If we allowed our hair to simply grow out of our heads, many of us would be barred or fired from our jobs. If we allowed our children's hair to grow similarly, many of our children would be dismissed from their schools. It is 2016. Sit with that for a moment. Most non-black folks fail to grapple with the profound implications of living in a society that institutionally requires an entire group to intervene so utterly in its own bodily reality and sanctions so heavily those who refuse to conform.

For most black women in America (although not all), if we allow our hair to simply grow out of our heads in its natural state, most people will assume that we are making a social and political statement.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Despite the high stakes and deep trauma so often associated with black women's hair, many non-black individuals and institutions remain stunningly uninformed about even the most basic aspects of black hair. It is both insulting and disheartening to flip the pages of sophisticated fashion magazines and find so many images of black women wearing hair pieces, weaves, wigs, and chemical treatments, featured next to white women without these hair interventions, while the copy surrounding the images makes no mention of the differences. (Granted, in the ELLE spread, a few pages on from page 110, the text mentions that many of Zendaya's styles are wigs and weaves.) The omission makes it seem as though, in each case, the hair is simply growing wholesale from the heads of individuals pictured.

Most Popular

This practice does violence to us.

In her smart, funny memoir, The Year of Yes, Shonda Rhimes writes about her daily, hours-long struggle as a teenage to make her hair look like Whitney Houston's. Curling irons, hair spray, and hours of frustration accompanied her attempts to make her hair looks like Whitney's. Then one day, years late, as a full-grown adult, Shonda is sitting at a hair salon and overhears a conversation between stylists. It turns out that, all along, Whitney's hair was a wig. Rhimes uses the story to illustrate the importance of accepting that working moms don't "do it all"; they all seek and hire great household help. But we shouldn't pass too swiftly over the hair story on the way to the childcare takeaway.

When magazines present hair pieces, weaves, wigs, and chemical treatments without any further clarification, they perpetrate a lie to black girls and women. Listen, no shade on extensions, lacefronts, sew-ins, or any other choices celebs and the rest of us make to look great. But magazines should not be reproducing another generation of teenage Shondas wasting precious hours trying to curl their hair into a wig.

This does not mean that every time a fashion magazine wants to include a black woman in a beauty spread on fall styles, or the new bob, or the hottest color trends, that it needs to include a humorless recitation of Willie Morrow's 400 Years Without a Comb to illustrate adequate understanding of black hair history. Cause damn. It does mean some ways of seeing black hair are just more woke than others.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

When Lemonade turned the world upside for a few days, it offered an indirect opportunity to reckon with all the instances in which this issue has been elided. Elle.com published "The Complete Breakdown of Beyoncé's Hair Look's from Lemonade." We even had input from her stylist Kim Kimble. Nailed it.

Sure, but let me draw your attention to this piece on the same topic by Bustle.com. They too reviewed all the badass hairstyles of Lemonade. But they one-upped our wokeness by telling readers why these styles matter. They put the beauty in context, giving it history and social meaning. Ours … solid. This one … lit.

To be fair, Bustle.com is an online publication founded just a few years ago. Its origins rest in a vastly different context than Elle.com, a site attached to a magazine first published in France in 1945. Which brings me to lesson number 4; legacy fashion magazines do not have a reservoir of goodwill with black women, and this deficit heightens the potential tensions in moments like this.

Lesson 4: Legacy Fashion Magazines do not have a reservoir of goodwill with black women

It is hardly a secret that the fashion world is whiter than an Academy Awards after party. The evidence is everywhere from runways to brand ad campaigns to fashion week to yes, fashion magazines .

But all of these (important) tallies can overshadow another point: More impactful than the absence of black and brown faces on runways and covers are the representational fails that occurring when black and brown editorial voices are not present in decision-making spaces. For decades the mainstream beauty and fashion industry—an industry made familiar to most of us through the women's magazines we buy on our local newsstands—has engaged in everything from the total erasure of black faces to the use of blackface. And yes, in the past decade some of these publications have openly, purposefully, and visibly, worked to alter these practices and improve both the substance and style of representation in their pages. I genuinely believe ELLE and Elle.com to be leaders in this area. I believe the people I work with and the magazine and website we create together are substantive, valuable, and diverse, if imperfect. I also believe that we inherited a legacy of brutally racist cultural practices. We are working to stitch a fabric of trust with our readers, but that fabric remains frayed by that legacy. We must be accountable to that legacy. We cannot pretend it does not exist, especially if we reproduce it, even inadvertently.

A personal note

I've been writing, working, and thinking with the team at Elle.com since March. In those months Kerry Washington, Beyoncé, Leslie Jones, and now FKA twigs have appeared on the cover of the magazine. The site has published my testimony to the Congressional Caucus on Black Girls and Women, given me a place to highlight the work of Girls for Gender Equity, and allowed me space to convene the voices of Japanese American women reflecting on the presidential visit to Hiroshima. All this and free lipstick samples. Listen, I am in heaven. When I saw the August cover it felt like the first real test of my new gig. Was the honeymoon over?

I got a call asking if I would be willing to write a piece for the site. I could write what I liked, from my own editorial perspective, even if it was critical. Yep. Let's do it. The team also asked if I would sit down to chat with Robbie Myers the editor-in-chief of ELLE. This was no Devil Wears Prada Act 1, Scene 2, when awkward Andy stumbles into Miranda Priestly office. Robbie and I talked about race, culture, gender, and the world of magazine publishing for more than an hour. I wasn't there to scold, and she wasn't there to apologize, but for me it was a radically different workplace experience to simply be heard and taken seriously on issues of race and representation.